I spent so many hours working on them. I also spent hundreds of dollars paying to have custom designs and logos made. I kept thinking that if I could just do this one thing or that other thing, then they would start paying off. It felt like I was on a mouse wheel, always running, but never getting anywhere.

No matter how much effort I put into them I just couldn’t get the traffic I wanted. Even the traffic that I was getting didn’t convert into revenue. I suppose I made a few pennies a day from adsense, but nothing substantial

As my frustration mounted, I started to look for information that would help me finally get my websites converting. I literally spent thousands of dollars on programs, videos, books, coaching, etc. I studied everything from product launches to mass control to video.

I was getting tired and running out of resources.

One day a friend of mine told me about some free training called the 30 Day Challenge. He asked if I was going to follow along with it. My first impression was “no way”. I figured that if the information I had paid thousands of dollars for didn’t get me where I wanted to be, then a free program certainly wouldn’t. I was a bit jaded about some of the programs I had purchased and the lack of results

He kept asking me about it and so I finally took a look at it. Then I decided to give it a try, so I registered a brand new domain name, runningshoesexpert.com, and decided to follow along with the 30 Day Challenge. I also found a buddy to work on it with me.

I was astonished at what happened!

I literally just set aside everything that I knew and followed the instructions given during the 2008 Challenge. Step by step. My buddy and I just did what the videos told us to do. That included everything from how to structure the blog, choose the keywords and create backlinks.

Within a few weeks I was amazed to see that our brand new website had taken the #6 spot for a rather competitive keyword. By the end of the challenge that year our site was getting an average of 180 visits per day.

Fast forward a few years now and that website is #1 on Google. It gets 1200 to 1500 visits per day and generates enough revenue to pay a mortgage payment, every month.

Just in the last year I’ve repeated that first success again and again for other keywords and sites. But it really started with the Challenge and Ed Dale back in 2008.

He’s at it again. It’s still free. It still works. And you can Learn all about the Challenge here.

If you decide to do the Challenge this year, leave a comment below and tell me how it goes. There’s nothing like making your first dollar online (except maybe making your second

If you pay close attention to what some of the more public copywriters of our era have to say about high quality sales copy, you’ll hear phrases like ‘mint your own money‘ and ‘grab them by the throat and force them to buy‘ or ‘2013% increase in conversions‘.

Of course those phrases are typically part of their sales pitch for a copy writing course and they’re practicing what they preach. For someone interested in writing better copy, those phrases are so tantilizing that they’re hard to pass by.

Books, methods and formulas

I’ve actually read a number of books on the subject of writing sales copy and most of them are really good. Some of them outline methods that you can follow. Others provide formulas. The best books (in my opinion) are those that give more far reaching perspective on life and the human experience. After all, it’s the human experience that really helps us connect with other people and talk to them about benefits.

One of those ‘human experience’ constants seems to be a play on our own weakness. That might be why the elevator pitch works so well. It boils down to this basic format:

Elevator Pitch

I help Name your ideal prospect
… do Some benefit to them/their business
… even if Play on their biggest weakness

An example elevator pitch would go something like this:

“I help entrepreneurs and start ups build profit generating websites with instant ROI even if they have a small budget and are clueless about where to start.”

This won’t get the attention of big businesses and it plays on the almost universal feelings of budget constraint and “where do I start” that most entrepreneurs feel.

Product Launches (or the sideways sales letter as Jeff Walker calls it) can be another effective method for selling to prospects because it incorporates relationship and authority into the sales process in a way that’s natural to many people.

One of the most helpful revelations about writing good sales copy came as I learned to differentiate Benefits from Features. This is especially true for technical products where the proprietor of the product tends to be excited about all the little features he’s built in and forgets to tell the consumer what emotional benefits those features bring.

But this article isn’t really about how to write good sales copy, is it? There’s one crucial component that even the best copy writing books just miss. I think it might be due to the fact that a seasoned copywriter just does it without thinking. Maybe they imagine that it’s a common sense part of the research phase. Maybe they have said it and I missed it for sooooo long. Whatever the case, it’s a real learning experience when the light finally turns on. What am I talking about?

Here’s the embarrasing part

I’m talking about writing the best sales copy in the world for a non-market and wondering what went wrong. It might be more accurate to say writing sales copy, videos and other materials over and over and over for a market that just won’t buy or doesn’t exist.

About 10 years ago I created a website for my running: Maintain Fit Exercise Log. The more time (and money)I invested in the site, the more convinced I was that it was going to be the next big thing. I spent hours of my life (days, weeks and months really) on that “product” confident that the next change would excite the masses and bring in the traffic (and the revenue).

When I finally realized that it was a non-market, I felt both cheated and liberated at the same time. At last I was free to let this beast die and divert my time and attention to new markets for testing. But I’m sure some will ask me to clarify what I mean by a non-market.

Or more specifically, how can you know if you’ve got a non-market? My introduction to this idea of a non-market came when I watched The Magnificent Symphony of Four Parts in 2008. Ed Dale effectively convinced me that I had taken the wrong approach on just about every business I had ever started. Here are two summary points that serve as a good indicator that you’ve got a non-market.

• No competition
• No mature companies/no commercial options

Unfortunately, most people skip this initial research phase when they have a new idea. Instead of figuring out whether there’s a market, whether they can get traffic and whether that traffic will convert, they hole themselves up in the basement and frantically work on developing a product. That’s what I did with Maintain Fit.

The sales copy surprise

When I finally stopped working on any project for which there wasn’t a definite market, I started to see some really worthwhile progress. The traffic was easier to get. The relationships I was forming were more meaningful. The deal flow increased.

What surprised me most of all is that Even Bad Copy Will Sell, if there’s a market. As I tested more and more things, I became exhausted trying to follow the sales copy methods, formulas and models. I finally stopped trying to write sales copy and instead I just wrote what came to me. Was it good sales copy. No, not particularly. But to my surprise it resonated with people and I made sales!

Hopefully, if I’ve motivated you to do anything, it is to Stop tweaking your sales copy for non-markets! If you’ve got a project/business/idea that just isn’t getting traction and you’ve “tried everything”, maybe your idea isn’t really that good after all. Go back to Ed Dale’s advice from 2008 (he covers this every year in The Challenge) and reverse your process.

Research -> Traffic -> Conversions -> Product!

As he woke that morning his keen young eyes quickly took in the color of the sky and he thrust his hand through the small square hole in his wall to feel the air outside.  Rain would come soon and allow the ear of the wheat fill out.  He concluded that “it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well.  Earth would bear fruit.”

Throughout the book Pearl Buck masterfully portrays the value of the land, the soil and the ability it has to give life.  To accomplish this she contrasts the poor farmer Wang Lung to the mighty House of Hwang.  The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, work and idleness, beauty and strength, is powerful and provides a very poignant perspective on what constitutes real value. The question never asked, but ever present: “Is there more value in the land or in silver?”

The final scenes in the book show a wealthy and old Wang Lung. Through hard work and discipline he had traded places with the House of Hwang. They forgot the value of the land and sold it to him in pieces, until he owned all that they once had. When he was finally too old to work the land, he returned to spend his final days away from the luxurious courts he had acquired. He moved back into the small three room stone house where his life began. He spent his days with bare feet in the soil. He loved to feel the earth.

In the puzzling way that values occasionally get lost before they can pass from one generation to the next, Wang Lung’s sons couldn’t see the real value of the land. Rather than growing up in the fields, working the land, they grew up in schools. They could calculate and barter better than their father, but they didn’t value the land.

In the final agonizing scene he quietly approaches his sons who came to visit him and he overhears them planning to “sell the land” to raise money to pursue other interests.  He chokes and stumbles and his sons catch him to hold him up.  In desperation with tears on his cheeks he tells them:

“It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land.  Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land -

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

His sons reassure their old dying father that they wont sell the land as they smile at each other over the top of his head.  They had lost track of the value of the land, just as the House of Hwang had done.

Where’s the value in internet marketing?

Wang Lung lived in the soil.  He also knew that he could die by the soil.  He understood the important relationship between the sky and the earth; the rain and the harvest.  He didn’t have the luxury of sitting idle or waiting on someone else to do his work for him.

As internet marketers do we understand the relationship between testing and profit; value and benefits? How many ‘would be’ internet marketers have been raised in schools, rather than in the field of knocking doors and producing content. They know the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.

Amid the din of discussion in the internet marketing space (which in the better circles focuses on time-tested direct response sales techniques), the best copywriters struggle and toil to teach the difference between features and benefits. It’s the tendency of newer marketers to place an emphasis on qualities and structure; features rather than benefits.

As marketers mature (they do this by reading the best books and working the field) their language naturally moves toward the concept of benefit. In the beginning it can sound a bit hollow.  The beginner’s efforts to identify benefits is quite often just a renaming of features or a correlation between features and benefits. This seems a good place to start, but it’s easy to spot, because there are many misses, and it still doesn’t talk to the heart of the consumer.

What are they missing? Could it be that they’ve never put themselves on the other side of the desk to consider life as their consumer? Just like Wang Lung’s sons that had no value for the land because their feet and hands had never worked the soil, many internet marketers have no respect for the consumer and the character of real benefits because they haven’t worked the tests and numbers necessary to find a winning combination that really strikes a chord.

Get your feet dirty

Ed Dale loves comparing internet marketing to farmville on facebook. The people that put in the hours move up in the world. They accumulate both experience, wisdom and, in the end, profit. The marketer that sets himself down to the grind of content creation and then judiciously distributes it in a way that permits proper testing will get the traffic. He’ll then be able to test offers until he finds one that’s a match for the niche or eliminates it as unsuccessful and moves on to the next.

Just as Wang Lung understood about the land, a bad crop doesn’t always mean a bad farmer and the necessity of success for the support of life doesn’t leave any time to sit around and complain. Whether the rain falls and the seeds grow into fruit bearing plants, or whether a drought prevents success one year or in one field, your work is the same.

Along the way you’ll come to appreciate the real value of content and the need to put in your best effort for it. Then the trick will be passing the internal substance of that value assessment on to the next generation of internet marketers so that they can produce for themselves.

I’m still working on the first part.

Leadership defecit

I’m not sure that he had in mind to point out that there’s a significant leadership deficit right now in America (both business and politics). Some people blame this on our academic system or use of standardized tests where an artificial bar of excellence has been established and everyone is taught from age five to measure themselves against it (and nothing higher). Others argue that TV and movies and other popular media discourage us from reading classic books, which is how character and values have been taught for centuries.

Whatever the true cause of the deficit, there’s little doubt that it exists. Rather than making difficult choices, like sacrifice, discipline and hard work, we seem to be a generation of entitlement. Everyone wants “their fair share”. No wonder Ed Dale and Frank Kern have been heard to lament that the one thing they can’t sell is the “do” part of what they teach.

Leadership vs. Management

One comparison that he uses throughout the book, which I think highlights the leadership deficit, is manager vs. leader. A manager’s job, he suggests, is to maintain the status quo. He isn’t there to innovate or to change. He has the sole purpose of ensuring that production of X goes on according to specifications. Leaders, on the other hand, define specifications.

While I don’t care for his use of the word heretic throughout the book, I think I see what he’s getting at. In this book I think a heretic is someone who challenges the status quo. The reason I say that I don’t like his use of the word is that I doubt most leaders would self identify as a heretic and by choosing a recalcitrant word, they might discount some of the strength of his arguments.

I believe that many leaders rise to their position not because they want to oppose established authority, but instead because they find their backs against the wall. For example, I think that many people would agree that the founders of the United States constitution were effective leaders.

Amid the din of patriotic praise for what they did, we might think that the government they established was heretical for it’s time. That’s not true. In fact, many of them tried (for many years) to reconcile their differences with Britain. They tried as hard to resolve the conflict beforehand as they did to establish independence afterward. They were also very well educated in matters of politics and familiar with the forms of government that have existed throughout the ages.

A leader doesn’t have to fly in the face of established patterns in order to lead. Sometimes to lead means to confront mutiny and maintain order according to specification (or the status quo).

How to identify your tribe

One significant question that the book doesn’t answer is “how do I identify my tribe”. This might have been his intention. After all, how do you teach someone where to go to look for people that might be interested in what you do? The fact is, you just have to make some noise and see who raises their hand in interest. In many cases, the people that compose your tribe may surprise you.

One aspect of identifying your tribe, that I think he understood to be implicit, is that you need to have a deep, burning passion for what your doing. Someone that lacks that all consuming drive for change will rarely be generous, selfless and enduring enough to inspire allegiance from their tribe (all qualities he attributes to leadership).

Noteworthy quotes

Here are a few quotes that I really enjoyed. By the way, I bought my copy on Amazon.

“great leaders don’t try to please everyone”

“the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin”

“Don’t mortgage today just because you’re in a hurry”

“It’s a myth that change happens overnight, that right answers succeed in the marketplace right away, or that big ideas happen in a flash.”

And of course, he has a blog: Seth Godin. Go subscribe now.

Engineering vs. Programming

By the time I was ready to head to the University and go through the rigors of of getting an “education” I didn’t really want to study programming.  I decided to go much deeper, in fact, and study the atoms inside the processor of the computer.

My degree from the University of Utah is in Electrical Engineering.  During my last year I focused almost exclusively on graduate level courses and lab research in optoelectronics and semiconductor device physics.  Optoelectronics is the study of how semiconductors absorb and emit light.

Microfabrication at the University of Utah

Since the labs at the UofU didn’t have the right equipment to fabricate many optoelectronic devices, I worked on a theoretical device which we called a spinFET.  It’s a type of transistor, which differs from contemporary transistors in one significant way.  Instead of just  manipulating the charge of the electrons that carry current through the device, it would manipulate their spin too.

This opens the door to ultra low power devices that could even be manipulated to exhibit super conductive properties at room temperature.  It could also enable quantum computing and other novel applications of technology that currently aren’t possible.

The Power of Mentors

As with many things in life, success in my research and my passion to succeed in what I studied had everything to do with the talented and willing mentors around me.  My advisor Mark Miller and fellow graduate students Justin Jackson and Divesh Kapoor were awesome!

If none of that made any sense, don’t sweat it.  If you’re curious to know more about it, here’s my senior thesis which provides some of the highlights of my research.

One thing you’ll notice is that I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the actual coding, because there isn’t really very much at all.  Using my approach (I show you in the video) nearly all the heavy lifting can be done using the “easy buttons” that are available with most modern hosting companies.

Here’s what I cover in this video:

• What alternatives there are to WordPress and why I still use WordPress
• Why Google loves WordPress blogs
• Email list segmentation and membership websites
• A little trick that will save you money finding premium solutions online (that’s all I can say in this teaser, but you’ll thank me once you see it)
• Prevent spam on your blog
• Protect your digital content
• When and how to upgrade your site (this is so easy it hurts)
• Best places to host your membership web site
• The top reasons to buy premium themes for WordPress

This is the full 1:15 video.  After you press play you might have to wait a minute for it to start loading (be patient).

In fact, I’ll be talking about alternative uses for membership websites, including education and online course delivery.  I’ll also cover payment integration methods and advanced autoresponder techniques to promote consumption of content while creating a passive interactive dialog which enables you to engage the most interested members of your community.

While I know this will be a very remote location for most of you, anyone is welcome.  I’ll be presenting at 3:00 pm in the Farnsworth building in room 65.  I’ll also record the session and post it here afterward.  If you have any topics you think I should cover, send me a message.

Use this link to learn more about the Boise Code Camp.

Since then I’ve built dozens of websites for companies both large and small. I worked for one other ad agency and I’ve worked as an consultant or small business owner providing web programming services. 10 years of experience creating technology for the internet has allowed me to identify several patterns or stereotypes that clients follow. I also have a pretty strong opinion about who I’m interested in working for and why.

Client Stereotypes

Two client stereotypes I’ve observed include the “do it yourselfer” and the “outsourcer”. The first one is bent on doing everything himself. While the outward appearance is the same for most do it yourselfers, the underlying motivation varies. Here are the two main reasons that someone takes on the do it yourselfer role:

• Don’t have (or want to spend) money to pay someone else to do it (it’s my precious)
• Don’t believe that anyone could really do it as well as they could (I’m the only non-idiot in the world)

I personally lean toward the do it yourselfer role, which is why I don’t really understand the outsourcers very well. The outsourcers are the ones that seem to have ideas, but don’t have any interest in the nitty gritty details. I’m not sure if they just don’t like doing it but they could, or if they don’t really feel like they could do it, but can see that it needs to be done. I suspect there are some who fall on each side.

Each stereotype described above comes with it’s own vision problems. For example, do it yourselfers don’t really understand what other people want. This probably stems from the fact that they don’t *care* what other people want. Outsourcers are really good at knowing what other people want, but they don’t know or care to learn how to get it for them. While oursourcers can identify a need and are usually good at selling it, they don’t always know if what they had produced (the thing they outsourced) actually scratches the itch it was intended to scratch.

Presumed Expertise

Regardless of which stereotype you approximate, every business owner takes on the role of “presumed expert”. For example, the very second you say something like “I have a small business selling switches to turn computer speakers off and on”, it wouldn’t be to outrageous to expect someone to say back “wow, I don’t know a thing about speaker switches. You must be really smart.” POW! You’re an expert!

Who knows if that’s really true or not. If you’re a do it yourselfer then you probably are an expert and you do know a lot about speaker switches. If you’re an oursourcer then you might not know anything more than that there was a need in that market and you found a product and filled the need. In either case, the rest of the world will look to you as an expert, and if they ever have a question about speaker switches, guess who they’re going to ask. That’s right, it’s you. Congratulations!

Web Developers

Let’s turn out attention to the average web developer for a minute. Here you have the ultimate do it yourselfer. He loves open source, he’s thrilled with all the things he doesn’t have to buy because he can make his own or “copy” someone else’s and he hates the idea of parting with any money. He also suffers from the short sighted affliction of “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but look how cool this is…”

So what happens when you put a do it yourselfer together with an outsourcer (this naturally happens all the time)? Well, you get some funny business in translation, and a few more assumptions.

What outsourcers really want

Here’s the deal. I have many outsourcers come to me as a web developer expecting to get a turn key site. They explain that they just want a site that will sell and have all the information it needs. They always want it to be easy to update and change. They want it to look good. They want it to be SEO optimized.

Those are all great things, and they are useful features, but no one on earth buys from a site because it is SEO optimized or looks good, or is easy to change. They buy something because they WANT it and they believe (or trust) that if they give you their money they will GET it. It has zero to do with the technology used to build the site.

So if people make purchases because they WANT something and they TRUST that you can give it to them, what are they really buying? In most cases they’re buying your expertise, or perceived expertise. I think this expertise (and the implicit trust that comes along with it) more or less amounts to what ad agencies call “brand”. A good agency is able to make someone or something look like a leading expert or authority. I know there’s a lot more to brand than that (and everyone has their own idea of brand), but this is a big part of it.

Outsourcing Expertise aka: The Big Web Blunder

Unfortunately, what I see happen all to often is that the presumed expert will try to outsource the entire task of creating a web site (outsourcers sometimes call this a web presence). Rather than provide the content for their new site one of two things will happen.

The first thing that could happen is rooted in the oursourcer’s misunderstanding about communication on the internet.  He thinks that it’s fundamentally different from communication in the “real world”. In this case he says to the web developer, “you’re the web expert, just build it how you think it should be and tell me if you need anything”. The problem with this approach is that the web developer knows nothing about the market or why the outsourcer chose it in the first place. This effectively amounts to outsourcing expertise to a non-expert in a subject. The results will be reflected in the inability of the site to convert visitors into paying customers.

The other, slightly better, possibility is that he has the web developer setup a site that he can populate, but he either doesn’t want to or doesn’t have time to publish the content that would establish him (his site) as an expert. So the site gets built but no expert establishing content ever makes it up there and the result is little to no traffic and dismal conversions.

Ad agencies and copywriters

About the only way I can see to get around this is exactly what direct response marketers have done for decades. I think that the better ad agencies and copywriters are effective at one special skill that makes them unique. They can suck the essence of the expert right out of your brain and present it to the consumer effectively. As long as the expert status correlates to a real WANT in the consumer’s mind, conversions are likely to follow. I’ve heard that the real secret to writing sales copy is research, research, research (and then a little research on top of that).

The biggest disappointment to most people is they can’t afford to hire a really good ad agency (and a fancy office does not an ad agency make) or a star copywriter for their projects.

Write the copy yourself

While outsourcing is a very important skill (and one that I’m getting much better at myself), the essence of what you’re trying to communicate needs to come from you. You are the expert. If people buy your product/service it’s because they trust you. So maybe in just this one thing you need to let go of the idea of farming out the copy and write for yourself.

A lot of people complain that writing isn’t fun or that it’s difficult. That might be true, but think back on any heroic, prolific or influential character in history and ask yourself “could they write?” In some cases, like presidents of the United States of America, they have speech writers. And if you can afford a presidential level speech writer, and let him suck those pearls out of your head and put them in writing, then you’re set. Otherwise, you’ll have to be like the rest of us and write your own speeches. That’s not to say that you have to build and operate the press that reproduces them (or the website that publishes them).

My conclusion: Don’t expect the a temp worker, or your web developer or some other vendor or employee to be able to produce expert worthy content for you. That’s one thing that you should always own. And don’t get fooled into believing that communication on the internet is any different than communication anywhere else. Words is words!

Since you are so into the good old USA, I wanted to sing you the National Anthem. I really hope you like it. I’m looking forward to talking with you on the phone soon.

Daniel

That’s really too bad since one of the projects I’m working on right now could benefit from some artistic ability.  I’d really love to call on my brother for help (he’s insanely artistic and creative), but he’s also very busy.  So I did what anyone else would do.

I went to you tube to learn to sketch people.  Here’s the video I found:

And here’s my first attempt at copying what someone else is good at. Which, by the way, is the real point of this post. I don’t have to be good at something if I have access to someone else that is good at it. As long as I observe well and take good notes AND MOST OF ALL, I have to do something with what I learn.

Let me know what you think of my first person sketch in the comments below.

how to sketch people - practice from youtube video